Chapter 42: The Holiday Party

The elevator to the Rainbow Room took sixty-five floors to make up its mind, and Rachel spent every one of them deciding not to throw up.

Not nerves. Baby. Mostly baby. She’d eaten four saltines in the car and pressed a ginger chew into her cheek like a ballplayer with tobacco, and she was still sweating under the green silk.

The green dress. The one from Bergdorf’s, the one Julian had laid on her bed back in October with a card that said wear it or don’t. Tonight she’d chosen it on purpose. If people were going to whisper, she wanted them to have something to whisper about.

“You can still change your mind,” Julian said. He was in a black suit, no tie, because he was the only man in Manhattan who could skip a tie at his own company’s party and make everybody else look overdressed.

“And miss my debut? Please.”

“They’re going to stare.”

“Julian, I scrubbed your toilets for ten months. I know exactly how to be in a room where nobody sees me.” The doors started to slide open. She hooked her arm through his. “Let’s try the other thing.”

* * *

They stared. God, did they stare. The Rainbow Room was all brass and candlelight and that big rotating dance floor, the whole city glittering out the windows, and three hundred people from Cross Dynamics turned their heads at once like sunflowers.

That’s her.

The wife?

I thought the blonde was the wife.

Girl, keep up.

Julian didn’t let go of her arm. He walked her through the room slowly and introduced her by name. “Rachel Moore.” Not my housekeeper, not my guest. Just her name, like that was enough.

Vanessa floated past in silver sequins, kissed the air near Julian’s ear, and told Rachel the dress was “very brave.” Rachel thanked her and asked if she’d found her other earring.

She took club soda with lime from the bar so she’d have something in her hand. At ten o’clock she was standing by the window near the coat check, watching a helicopter cross the Hudson, when somebody bumped her elbow hard enough to spin her.

Cold and wet, everywhere. A long red stain was spreading from her collarbone to her hip, soaking the silk dark as a bruise.

“Oh my God.” Chloe Sutton, in red, of course, holding an empty glass of cabernet like she’d never seen it before. “Rachel, I’m so sorry. These floors, right? It’s like the room is moving.” She pressed her free hand to her chest. Rachel’s mother’s pearls sat right under it. “Maybe you should just go home? You look a little wet.”

A circle had opened around them. Thirty people, maybe more, drinks halfway up.

Rachel’s first instinct was the old one. Shrink. Apologize. She’d done that for eleven years.

She looked at the stain. She looked at the pearls. Then she looked Chloe dead in the eye and said, at a perfectly normal volume, “It’s okay. I know it’s hard keeping your hands off things that are mine.”

Somebody snorted. Then somebody else lost it, and that was it. The whole circle went. A guy in a Santa tie had to turn around and face the wall.

Chloe’s cheeks went the color of her dress.

“Nice pearls, by the way,” Rachel added. “They were my mother’s.”

* * *

The attendant in the ladies’ room, a heavy older woman named Joyce with a Jamaican accent and reading glasses on a chain, took one look at her and said, “Club soda, baby, and don’t you dare rub.”

Joyce blotted. Rachel stared at herself in the mirror. Mascara fine. Lipstick fine. Dress ruined. Four thousand dollars of Julian’s money, dying in a sink.

On her way in she’d passed the bar. Michael on his elbow next to Harold Kemp, heads together, Kemp’s hand on his shoulder, same as in the party photo Owen had shown her. She’d heard two words. The maid.

Two weeks ago she’d stood in a parking garage and whispered Kemp’s own words into Michael’s ear and watched him go white. He’d been scared of her for about a minute. He’d had two weeks to get over it.

Rachel took out her phone. Voice Memos. She pressed the red circle, watched the little line start to wiggle, and slid it back into the clutch screen-down.

She wasn’t going to hide behind a pillar. If she was going to have it, she was going to be standing in it.

“Thank you, Joyce.” She tucked a twenty into the tip jar. “I’ve got to go be stupid now.”

“Mm. Be stupid careful.”

* * *

She walked straight to the bar in the ruined dress and set her club soda down between them.

“Harold,” she said. “Michael.”

Kemp turned his head slowly, the way old money does, like turning cost something. “Mrs. Hayes. Or is it Ms. Moore this evening.”

“Depends who’s asking.”

Michael was three drinks in. She could tell by his ears. “Rach. You look like a crime scene.”

“Your girlfriend has bad aim.” She held his eyes. “I want my mother’s jewelry box, Michael. The one that got lost in the move.”

He laughed and looked at Kemp, not at her. “Talk to Whitfield. That’s what he’s for.”

“I’m talking to you.”

“And I’m talking to Harold.” He turned his shoulder a quarter inch, enough to put her outside it, and kept going like she was the bartender. Like she was a coat rack in green silk. “Relax. I told you. January’s fine.”

The band was loud. She caught “after the audit.” She caught “Linden.” Kemp’s dry murmur and the ice in his glass. Twice Michael glanced back at her with that little smile, the one that said she couldn’t follow a word, and twice she let him think so. She stood there, a foot from both of them, in the conversation and under it at the same time, the way she’d stood at a hundred dinner parties holding a tray.

Kemp looked right at her once. “You’ll want to change, dear. Red doesn’t come out.”

“Neither does a lot of things,” Rachel said.

Then the music cut out.

Somebody tapped a microphone. Michael set down his glass, squeezed Kemp’s arm, and climbed onto the edge of the bandstand with a flute of champagne. His cheeks were flushed. His hair was perfect. Chloe stood at his feet in her wine-red dress, beaming up at him like she’d been told to.

“Everybody, sorry, one second.” Michael flashed the smile that had gotten him every job he’d ever had. “It’s been a hell of a year at Cross Dynamics. A hell of a year. And I couldn’t have gotten through it without one person.”

Every head in the room turned between Michael and Rachel and back again like a tennis match.

Rachel’s clutch was still recording against her ribs.

Michael lifted his glass high. “To my beautiful fiancée. Chloe.”